"You cannot change back? What do you mean?"
"Exactly that," Loki said, fiddling with the top button of his shirt.
It was her turn to glower and she kept it up until he caved under her stare.
"All my previous transformations were triggered by a defense mechanism, where my flesh reacted to a being frozen and shifted into… this, without my active participation. It was always a brief moment and it just went away when the source was removed," he said. He was making an effort to keep his voice steady, but it was still frilly at the edges, making it apparent how thinly that layer of calmness was spread. "This time I held onto it for longer, as you can see."
"How do you do that?"
"It's hard to explain."
"Try me."
An angry scowl passed across his face like a shadow and he parted his lips to utter a rebuttal, then thought better about it and kept it in. He took a deep breath and settled closer to the sofa behind his back. "It's an involuntary reaction, like dodging when you have a weapon hurled at you in a fight, but it's not entirely unconscious. As in, a few steps are omitted in the thought process, but you're aware it's happening, as it happens."
She nodded. The example did help a lot.
"I held on to that thought. Stayed down after the dodge, instead of getting back up, so to speak."
"Mhm," she murmured. That also made sense, even if in a very vague way. She still didn't fully understand how the change worked and something was telling her that Loki didn't know either. "I still don't see what's the problem is."
"Once that urge to revert the change passed, I just stayed in this form. And now I'm… stuck. I simply don't know how to reverse it."
"Isn't the whole magic thing kind of your deal?" she blurted and immediately regretted how condescending it sounded. She shouldn't be fueling his insecurities like that, he'd been doing an amazing job at it himself.
He let out a sigh and hung his head down. "I can't access my magic either. I can feel the energy flowing inside me, but it feels… wrong. As if it was a text in a language I once knew and now have forgotten."
Loki's parallel game was top-notch, she had to admit. "Is it even possible? To forget magic?"
"It's not about memory. I remember how it's supposed to be done, but now that knowledge is incompatible, somehow." His voice was barely a whisper at that point, brittle and dejected.
"I don't know what to tell you," she said. "Maybe it's because of this new form and you need to get used to that first?"
He raised his head and his eyes slowly focused on some unspecified point beyond the window. "Maybe," he said.
She could see his profile now, the sharp lines of his cheekbones, nose and jaw highlighted by the fuzzy light of the city, his heavy lids half closed and lips slightly parted. There was sadness in those lines, and pain, and despair, and, underneath it all, a subtle kind of beauty, hiding in his laughter lines, the curves of his eyebrows and the shape of his lips.
She edged closer and nudged his arm with her elbow. "I'm sure you're going to get it eventually, space boy."
Romanoff stayed for a while, just sitting by his side, so close his shoulder would touch hers if he moved just a thumb, and not saying anything at all.
He should be furious. He should be fuming she dared to invade his privacy like that and still had the audacity to insist he was not their hostage.
He should've told her to leave. He shouldn't have opened the door at all.
Yet he had. He had let her in and then sat at her side and listened to her words and let them placate him, let them lull the voice screaming at him from inside his thoughts and put it to sleep. It was still there, he could still feel it, but it was silent now, dozing off.
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps the humans really thought nothing about what he was. Perhaps it was really just the ages of listening to the Æsir tales that made his mind reel with "monster" and "enemy" and "beast" and "danger" at the very glimpse of his own hands.
It didn't matter, of course. It wasn't only his looks that counted. And his actions spoke louder than any words could. Oh, how well he could understand why Odin had always been so harsh in his punishments, now. Just one slip of the All-Father's attention, and Loki tried to annihilate one world, and conquer another, not thinking, just running ahead with his teeth bared, all the reason and all the knowledge he claimed to cherish so bad left behind, abandoned in the dust of his hurts and grievances.
Like a mindless beast indeed.
No, it wasn't his skin that made him one; it was his mind, cruel and vicious, so easy to twist and coerce, so quick to bend and break under pressure.
None of it would happen if Odin had locked him up, like he'd threatened to do so many times. Not for a short while, but properly, forever. Or left him on Jötunheimr to die, as was his fate.
He stifled a sigh and dragged himself up, then walked the few steps it took to reach the bed and crashed onto it. He should have taken a shower first, but he was rather certain he wouldn't be able to bear looking at himself in the huge bathroom mirror for more than a couple of heartbeats and Stark wouldn't take it too kindly if Loki started smashing his furnishings, after explicitly being told not to.
The linens had been changed again and Loki wondered briefly who was performing the menial tasks in Stark's house. Despite the obvious wealth the man must've possessed, there were no servants here. Or perhaps they were just that good at hiding their tracks and keeping out of the way.
Oh, the nobles of Asgard would love servants or slaves like that, completely invisible, yet still performing their tasks, as long as they could be called for their daily lectures and punishments or to be the bedwarmers.
Loki personally never needed such services, he was hardly ever cold.
He wasn't cold now either, but he still pulled the satin duvet over himself.
His body hits the hard floor of the cell with a loud thud, sending vibrations through his bones and making him inadvertently bite down on the metal between his teeth, rousing a new wave of pain, this time in his jaw. It's just another song joining the symphony of agony thrumming all over his body – of all the hundreds of small, but excruciatingly deep cuts Ebony Maw's shards have caused, of his bloodied back where Nebula shredded his skin with that awful whip of hers, of his parched throat that's been screaming for water for what must be days now, without any respite – and Loki just disregards it.
The Chitauri guard snarls some uncreative invective while his colleague – just as ugly and anonymous as the other one – chains Loki in place for the night. At least it's what Loki supposes passes for the night on the Sanctuary, which is drifting in some Norns-forsaken stretch of nothingness between worlds.
They didn't allow him to talk today, so there was no lenience to be earned and the chain connecting his collar to the floor is just three links long.
The Chitauri guard grants him a farewell gift of a kick to the ribs and the door closes with a whine of abused metal, surrounding Loki in darkness. Loki listens to the guards walking away, their armored boots clattering on the grated platform outside of his cell, until he can no longer make it over the rush of blood in his ears.
He doesn't bother with finding a comfortable position, it's an impossible task anyway, but he does arch his spine back, to lessen some of the strain the ties on his hands put on his shoulders. Then he curls up where they left him and closes his eyes. It doesn't make a difference, but with that, there's a better chance he will be lucky and the sleep will claim him before the hallucinations start.
The solace is short-lived. Soon there are other steps, more ominous, as they are heading in his direction. He perks up, listening.
The door screeches on the rusty hinges and the light floods his eyes. And then there are hands on him, wrong hands, white hands with six bony fingers on each and with long claws that leave bloody trails on his skin.
"I've been waiting for you to come back to me, my pet," a voice whispers into his ear and it's wrong too. "Like an obedient cur that you are."
It is too early, the Other shouldn't be here, he shouldn't be on the Sanctuary, he didn't learn about Loki at all yet.
But that matters little and the long fingers wrap around his throat and Loki tries jerking away. The chain and the grip hold him in place, while the voice whispers promises of anguish and torment and suffering and his mind being split open. The claws travel down Loki's spine.
He tries to bargain, but only an unintelligible moan makes it through the gag and the fingers are insistent, clawing and tearing at his wounds, until Loki can hold it in no longer. A shrieking wail tears from his lungs, bounces off the walls and echoes down the corridors.
Loki woke up with a jolt and a scream stuck in his throat. His hipbone was throbbing dully and the sheets were tangled around his limbs, keeping him immobile. He stopped struggling as the reality returned in bursts, with the sight of carpet in front of his eyes, with the first light of the dawn seeping through the windows, with the smell of linens. Then he just lay there, panting, the visions of pain and darkness and cruel hands and metal holding his body in place slowly fading from his mind.
It isn't real, he told himself, but it didn't help, so he did what he did best – he lied.
You're safe here.
He untangled his limbs from the sheets and wiped his face, only for his hand to come up bloodied. He grunted in displeasure. Bloody tears, what kind of evolutionary trait was that? As if being stuck in a body of a Frost Giant wasn't enough of a humiliation on its own…
With a sigh, he dragged himself up, just to freeze again halfway through turning around towards the bathroom.
There was a box on the floor, right next to the door and it certainly wasn't there the night before. Someone came to his room when he was sleeping, and somehow avoided waking Loki up. Oh, he definitely was feeling too safe here, if they were able to sneak up on him like that.
The box was sitting there, teasing him, reminding him of this most recent failure, so he picked it up and turned it around in his hands. It was a flat rectangle, as thick as his thumb and as long as his forearm on the longer edge and came wrapped in a gray paper, without any markings. Loki didn't understand many customs Midgardians practiced but this – just leaving seemingly random boxes in people's rooms when they are sleeping – was probably the weirdest of them all and Loki considered just leaving it where he found it until the mystery inevitably solved itself.
In the end, his curiosity won, and he tore the paper away. The shape didn't much change, but now he had an illustration on the top lid to work with. It was one of the computer-like devices Stark and Bruce were using, the flat ones, without the attached keyboard. The box had Stark's name on it, but it looked more like branding, not a mark of ownership. Perhaps his enterprise was making those? Loki hadn't asked the Hawk what Stark was manufacturing once he stopped making arms.
The packaging was intricate and layered, first a thin layer of plastic foil, then the rigid cardboard box, then some foam and a smaller box inside, but in the end Loki got to the device and turned it around in his fingers. He still had no idea why Stark – because that seemed like a reasonable assumption – wanted him to have it, but it was still a welcome distraction and a promise of a more involving pursuit than sitting on the floor and staring out of the window, as his plans for today had looked up until this moment.
The device didn't have too many buttons to try and after brief experimentation, he found the one that turned it on. The screen blinked to life and informed him about an initial setup being performed.
He left the computer on the bed and ventured into the bathroom for a quick shower.
He managed not to smash the mirror, if just barely.